If Biden allows Trump to weaponize language like this, the American narrative will further shift toward a realm of “alternative facts” and enter a hellish realm of ambiguity, ripe for the plotting of totalitarian propaganda. Given the United States’ global power, allowing such an atmosphere to rule could have severe international repercussions.

Canada is now faced with an opportunity to take real initiative on defining the scope of arms control around an emerging technology that is on the verge of being adopted into wider military use, and falling out of human control. To do so, it will be necessary to show independence from an unscrupulous ally that is besieged by its own manifest destiny.

The United States continues to have the largest total number of cases of COVID-19. The government continues to flounder as the number of cases escalates. Not one state in the country seems immune to the spread of the disease. Meanwhile, in China, ever since the virus was crushed in Wuhan, the government merely has had to contain small-scale localized outbreaks

Donald Trump did not cause the white lumpenproletariat, although his words and actions have mobilized and unleashed them in a variety of alt-right, neo-Nazi, fascist, and white nationalist organizations, including armed militias that will probably become more active if Trump is denied the presidency.

It is up to us to abolish the American kleptocracy. It is up to us to mount sustained acts of mass civil disobedience to bring down the empire. It poisons the world as it poisons us. If we mobilize to build an open society, we hold out the possibility of beating back these crisis cults as well as slowing and disrupting the march towards ecocide.

Unity through political action and the capacity to mobilize targeted communities into supportive public action is critical to act as a bulwark against oppression by armed bodies whose raison d’etre is to enforce laws that protect those with property against those without it. Nothing less will work.

Who is Bob Dylan in 2020? His new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, finds him contemplating the tremendous weight of legacy and history and how to make sense of it all. Dylan tackles these questions by immersing himself in that history, becoming both subject and historian, both object of cultural critique and the critic.

We can’t just count on changing people’s minds without simultaneously transforming our collective political-economic structures. The causal arrow of social change doesn’t just go from changed social beliefs to changed power relations. It also goes from changed power relations to changed beliefs.

The enormous and violent efforts by the United States and the Lima Group to secure regime change in Venezuela raises a question: Is this the policy Canadians want our government to pursue? Iran and Venezuela have shown courage in challenging US hegemony against all the odds. Where is Canada’s courage?

On May 25, George Floyd, a black resident of Minneapolis, died after being handcuffed and pinned to the ground by the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin. Some of Floyd’s last words were “I can’t breathe.” This event marked yet another appalling viral bystander recording of an unarmed black man’s needless and unconscionable death. Calls for justice are widespread. Police reform is desperately needed.